This is the Year – Garden Thoughts

by

Mel

-

31st January 2018

Last year Gav kept telling me ‘this is the year’….. He meant that 2017 was the year our garden would finished. He did his absolute best I must admit and was out there working many, many, many more hours than I was. And it is almost there. Almost tidy, almost done.

But you know what? A garden is never really ‘done’. That is the beauty of it. What I mean by done is that it is how you want it at that particular moment in time.

Last year I found it harder than usual to do the routine things. The weeding and tidying. I was wondering what the reason might have been for this…..

Was it the weather that makes it hard work?

Was it that I want to garden in the mornings but I’m (was!) at work?

Was it that I have shifted in my love and rather than have a herbaceous border I want grow annuals?

Is it the fact that basically I’m lazy….. hmm probably!

It’s not that I don’t love a herbaceous border I do, oh I do but the weeding! Have I mentioned the weeding??It kills me and now I have trouble kneeling it makes it even harder work. We have pernicious grass that wends its way through the soil and tangles in the roots of the perennials…..

Over the last couple of years we have both worked hard towards getting the middle border in better shape with a view that border being the only truly herbaceous one, although not truly because it does have a couple of shrubs in it too!

And the other borders are moving more to shrubs and bulbs.

The plan this year then is to get all the greenhouse shelving finished. Gav will be working on that in March when he has a week off. He also wants to finish the garden at the front of the house. I’m going to dig all the plants out of what we call the ‘bump’ bed and weed it throughly a couple of times then plant it back up with a few little shrubs.

I’ll give the middle border a good weed too (insert forced smiling emoji) and move a few plants about a bit and also try to get the living fence into some kind of shape. And of course we will be growing veg and flowers.

It is an ebb and flow that I should be used to by now after all I’ve been gardening for over 20 years…..eek!

Hopefully I’ll be back to chat about those flowers soon, I just need to make my mind up on what to order.